Due to the abundance of multimedia content made available through various means and, in particular, through the Internet, there is a need to provide effective filters in order to prevent the exposure of inappropriate content to users. The definition of inappropriate content is subjective and depends on the perspective of each person who may view such content. The differences among definitions of “inappropriate” are usually derived from a person's characteristics such as age, geographic location, religion, background, and the like. In some cases, a person or his or her supervisor may wish to control the content made available to such person.
A user or supervisor of that user may want to prevent the user from being exposed to certain portions of content. In such cases, the user and/or supervisor may desire to prevent display of such portions of content in multimedia content. As an example, a doctor may seek to prevent a pedophile from being exposed to images containing content related to infants as part of a medical treatment. As another example, a smoker who is currently undergoing rehabilitation may not want to be exposed to images containing content related to cigarettes and people smoking. As yet another example, a parent may wish to prevent his or her child from accessing content featuring excessively violent imagery and/or written or spoken foul language. Despite these needs to prevent the display of certain elements in multimedia content, such elements are still widely accessible and may be encountered in a variety of situations.
Prior art solutions for preventing exposure to certain content which are commonly used by search engines include methods for searching and identifying inappropriate sources of content such as, for example porn websites, and preventing the display of content received from such sources. The existing solutions typically filter inappropriate content based on, for example, URLs of websites tagged as inappropriate, content classification using textual and attributes analysis of the web-pages, and so on. Content retrieved from sources other than web-pages are typically scanned for viruses but not for the nature of the content.
Current solutions for content filtering are typically inefficient in cases where inappropriate content is received from a source which is not classified as inappropriate by the search engine. Furthermore, as the content available in the Internet continues to grow exponentially, the task of identifying every inappropriate source of inappropriate content has become increasingly difficult.
It would therefore be advantageous to provide a solution that would overcome the deficiencies of the prior art by providing an efficient and dynamic tool for preventing users from being exposed to inappropriate content.